“You are afraid of hell. But that’s all religion is, really. Fear of a place we’d rather not be, and where there’s no such a thing as suicide to steal us away.”

“Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said ‘hopeless,’ though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can”

“Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away.”

“The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.”

“Suicide doll’s suicide Pretty, but with death there’s no way to hide Afraid to make a cut, see there’s nothing inside If your friends told you to jump off a bridge You’d step to the edge and fly. ._.”

“That’s the great illusion of travel, of course, the notion that there’s somewhere to get to. A place where you can finally say, Ah, I’ve arrived. (Of course there is no such place. There’s only a succession of waitings until you go home.)”